This invention concerns a web driven system or application for recording and sharing observations of birds or other wildlife species on a social networking platform, and for generating an accurate collection of bird observations and issuing rare species discovery alerts, via crowdsourcing.
Bird watching or “birding” is the practice of observing birds. It is both a hugely popular hobby as well as a serious scientific endeavor. An estimated 100 million “birders” spent $93 billion in 2009 on birding.
The sensitivity of avian life allows the scientific community to study bird migration as an excellent method to measure the condition of the earth's ecological health. However, studies of migration depend heavily on the accurate observations of birds.
Technology, in the form of mobile computer devices such as smartphones, has greatly improved the accuracy of such bird observation. Today software applications or “apps” for smartphones and tablets use features such as “search engines” to replace the inefficient guessing required by the printed field guides. These apps have in turn led to a great increase in the number of people aware of and actively observing bird life.
iBird, an application available for iPhones, iPads, tablets and other portable computer devices, helps bird watchers identify birds found in the field and includes illustration renderings, photographs and bird sounds as well as listings of particular bird characteristics, and has been a very successful product. iBird can be used in the field without Internet connection.
eBird is a web site program for bird watchers that enables them to upload information including names of birds observed, in a step-by-step process. eBird provides a platform that helps a bird watcher record bird sightings, which can be over a long period of time. The eBird system runs on the Internet and users connect to it with a web browser, and via this connection the user uploads observations, which are stored on a web server. The eBird system primarily follows what is described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,772,142. The patent teaches that bird observation data from these uploads can be correlated with geographic information by the server, and collectively the data from many observers can be analyzed to determine bird population at various geographic locations, as well as bird migration patterns.
However, there has been no reliable way of verifying the accuracy of a person's sightings of a bird species. Indeed, the reliability of bird identification is riled with issues, which have to do with the variability of our senses, and leads to unpredictable observations and reporting of observations. Further, no prior shared species observation system had any capability to alert or inform users of unusual sightings of species. Users must constantly review the database visually.